Indore: An Air India plane from Mumbai to
Delhi with 140 passengers and six crew members had a close
shave today when it suffered a bird hit while landing at the
city airport here, sending jitters among those on board for
the second consecutive day.

The pilot, however, landed the aircraft safely, he said.
Two tyres of the same aircraft, with 106 people on board,
were found deflated on landing at the Delhi`s Indira Gandhi
International Airport yesterday, causing an alarm.

The IC-133 flight later took off for Bhopal after
engineers inspected the aircraft and found it airworthy, Air
India Station Manager, V V Gadgil said.

"Engineers inspected the plane and when everything was
found normal, it was given permission to continue its onward
journey," he said.

Earlier this month, an Air India Express Dubai-Pune
flight with 112 passengers on board, dropped several thousand
feet over Muscat air space after hitting an air pocket, giving
anxious moments to those on board.

About a week later, a mid-air collision was averted by
pilots as a Jet Airways and an Air India plane came
`dangerously close` on the same flight path over Tamil Nadu.
Air India flight IC 671 and Jet Airways flight 9W
4758, carrying nearly 250 passengers and crew, came close to
colliding with each other at a height of 17,000 feet near
Trichchirapalli air space, triggering an Air Traffic Collision
Avoidance siren in both the planes.

The Air India flight was bound from Chennai to Madurai
and the Jet flight was headed to Chennai from
Thiruvananthapuram.

On June 3, a possible disaster was averted at Mumbai`s
Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport when a flight was
cleared for landing while another plane was waiting for
take-off on the same runway.

A Chennai-bound Spicejet flight with 201 passengers
was cleared for take-off shortly after 1.30 a.m. but the
flight commander detected some technical problem and
informed the air traffic control.

At the same time, the ATC had already cleared for
landing a Kingfisher Airlines flight arriving from New Delhi.
The Kingfisher flight too had some 200 passengers on board.
On May 22, an Air India Express aircraft had overshot
the runway at Mangalore airport and crashed into a ravine
killing 158 passengers, the worst air dasaster in a decade.